Abstract
We propose a framework for analyzing discourse by combining two interdependent concepts from sociolinguistic theory: face acts and politeness. While politeness has robust existing tools and data, face acts are less resourced. We introduce a new corpus created by annotating Wikipedia talk pages with face acts and we use this to train a face act tagger. We then employ our framework to study how face and politeness interact with gender and power in discussions between Wikipedia editors. Among other findings, we observe that female Wikipedians are not only more polite, which is consistent with prior studies, but that this difference corresponds with significantly more language directed at humbling aspects of their own face. Interestingly, the distinction nearly vanishes once limiting to editors with administrative power.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.sigdial-1.4
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
- Month:
- September
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Kyoto, Japan
- Editors:
- Tatsuya Kawahara, Vera Demberg, Stefan Ultes, Koji Inoue, Shikib Mehri, David Howcroft, Kazunori Komatani
- Venue:
- SIGDIAL
- SIG:
- SIGDIAL
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 40–50
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.sigdial-1.4
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2024.sigdial-1.4
- Cite (ACL):
- Adil Soubki, Shyne E. Choi, and Owen Rambow. 2024. Examining Gender and Power on Wikipedia through Face and Politeness. In Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 40–50, Kyoto, Japan. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Examining Gender and Power on Wikipedia through Face and Politeness (Soubki et al., SIGDIAL 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/dois-2013-emnlp/2024.sigdial-1.4.pdf